Thursday, November 25, 2010

Maybe next time the police will leave out a grand piano, in white, emblazoned with the metropolitan police logo. But the protesters' concrete experience of the state's cynicism and lies has to be worth more than a trashed decoy van, just in terms of citizenship education.

Most people must understand, at some level, that the point of this government is the restitution of nineteenth century social relations. Even their lying propaganda is nineteenth century. Unless one of these protests succeeds, the government probably will.

A recent column in the Guardian by Slavoj Zizek managed to include a quotation that was anti Jewish in tendency and anti Gypsy in substance. This week, Jonathan Jones's column manages to misrepresent the students' protest against increased tuition fees, and provide an example, in the author's muddled prose, of the priggishness and petty ignorance that the present university system is alleged to inculcate.

Jones attempts to explain Nietzsche's concept of the "dionysian" in art, of which he is reminded by some pictures he's seen of the students' protest. Perhaps imagining himself to be writing from Mount Olympus, he sees no reason to mention Nietzsche, who existed in a particular historical context, preferring to regard his theory as holy writ. Jones either feels his readers don't deserve to know the context of the ideas they're being fed, or Jones wants to take credit for them: either as their originator, or as a Derek Acorah of philosophy, channeling the voices of the ghosts.

The students' protest was entirely rational in intention. It clearly expressed an open antagonism. It didn't coincide with Jonathan Jones's personal plans and intentions, and so is presented as its opposite: "irrational, savage, destructive", "all the suppressed antagonisms of daily life explode in riot". With or without the intervention of all the gods of wine, beer and stout, Jonathan Jones seems to be having trouble getting out of his own head.

Tuesday, November 09, 2010

"The biological necessity for morality arises because, for the species to survive, any animal must have, on the one hand some egoism -a strong urge to get food for himself and to defend his means of livelihood; also- extending egoism from the individual to the family to fight for the interests of his mate and young. On the other hand, social life is impossible unless the pursuit of self-interest is mitigated by respect and compassion for others. A society of unmitigated egoists would knock itself to pieces; a perfectly altruistic individual would soon starve. There is a conflict between contrary tendencies, each of which is necessary to existence, and there must be a set of rules to reconcile them. Moreover, there must be some mechanism to make an individual keep the rules when they conflict with his immediate advantage."